Natively booting OS X and Windows 7 on a hella fine Dell Mini is initially challenging but well worth the reward of being the coolest nerd on the block. Here’s what you’ll need to accomplish this task:

First thing is first, get setup by burning the CDs and DVDs that you’ll need. Next, you will have to create a bootable USB drive with Leopard on it. You can probably do this using a Linux utility or you can do it if you have an extra Mac laying around, but I did it by temporarily booting to the Kalyway OS X DVD and then following the instructions for creating the USB boot drive. Note that this tutorial does not use the Kalyway DVD for the actual install. Then…

Install Windows 7 on freshly partitioned and formatted disk

I loosely followed the gizmodo dell mini 9 tutorial. First, I installed Windows 7 from scratch, with a fresh partition and a fresh format. Note: when you format/partition under Windows 7, it creates some kind of System partition. In order to avoid this, you can click “Cancel” when the message pops up about Windows automatically adding files/a partition. Alternatively, you can pre-partition the drive under the Kalyway boot or by using gparted disk partitioner. This will partition the drive using MBR; that’s what you want, fa sho.

Make sure no other system formatted drives (such as the Mac OS X USB drive you will create) are plugged in when you attempt to install Windows 7. You’ll run into a variety of errors. Check my blog for details.

Create 2 new partitions for Mac OS X and the temporary installer

Once Windows was installed, I used Windows Disk Management to shrink my Windows partition and create two new partitions. One was 50gb (for Mac OS X) and one was 5GB (for a trick we’ll do later). You can merge this partition later, don’t fret.

Basically, I pressed Esc at the boot prompt, typed in the hex for my USB drive (80) and then booted with the -f option. Once I was able to, I opened the Disk Utility and properly formatted my two new drives to Mac OS X Journaled.

It took about a week and about 3200 repartitions/reformats to get this routine down but it was time well spent; my $350 Hackbook is mega. Thanks to the slew of people who spent the time creating various tutorials that made this party possible!

Chrissy is a PowerShell MVP who has worked in IT for nearly 20 years, and currently serves as a Sr. Database Engineer in Belgium. Always an avid scripter, she attended the Monad session at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles back in 2005 and has worked and played with PowerShell ever since. Chrissy is currently pursuing an MS in Systems Engineering at Regis University and helps maintain
RealCajunRecipes.com in her spare time. She holds a number of certifications, including those relating to SQL Server, SuSE Linux, SharePoint and network security. She recently became co-lead of the SQL PASS PowerShell Virtual Chapter. You can follow her on Twitter at @cl.